BEING in the ZONE Simulation, and Staging Retail Theater at ESPN Zone Chicago Implosion Draws Consumers Into a JOHN F

“This emphasis JOURNALSherry et al. OF / BEING CONTEMPORARY IN THE ZONE ETHNOGRAPHY / AUGUST 2001 on extravaganza, BEING IN THE ZONE simulation, and Staging Retail Theater at ESPN Zone Chicago implosion draws consumers into a JOHN F. SHERRY JR. ROBERT V. KOZINETS web of secular Northwestern University DIANA STORM sport-oriented University of Southern Denmark–Odense University sacraments that ADAM DUHACHEK loom in a KRITTINEE NUTTAVUTHISIT BENÉT DEBERRY-SPENCE larger-than-life Northwestern University JOHN F. SHERRY JR., professor of marketing at the liminal state . .” Kellogg School, is an anthropologist who studies both the sociocultural and symbolic dimensions of consumption and the cultural ecology of marketing. He is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association as well as the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is a past president of the Association for Consumer Research and a former associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. He enjoys wandering the world as a researcher, teacher, and consultant. ROBERT V. KOZINETS is an assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Grad- uate School of Management, where he teaches classes in new product development and the entertainment industry. Working as an anthropologist, he also has marketing and consulting experience. His research explores technology, subcultures, communities, and consumer resistance. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 30 No. 4, August 2001 465-510 © 2001 Sage Publications 465 466 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / AUGUST 2001 Experiential consumption is a topic of growing interest in the social sci- entific and managerial literatures. While consumer experience is pro- foundly shaped by the built environment, a critical eye has been cast on the oppressive nature of themed environments. While offering multisensory sensual opportunities, themed retail environments cater primarily to the visual impulse and have been theorized to both direct and misdirect attention in ways beneficial to marketers. In this ethnography of the servicescape of ESPN Zone Chicago, the ways in which retail theater encourages consumers to animate a themed sporting venue and the ways consumers respond to these cultural prompts are explored. The authors explore the instrumental relationship between retail space and consumer experience in themed environments and attend to the interre- lated role of the visual, the sacred, brand, mass media, and sport. Con- clusions find that consumers watch marketers in these spaces as much as marketers watch consumers—a finding termed obverse panopticism. I come here to watch the games. I first come to eat, and then I come to watch. It’s a way to escape, release tension . the traffic, the tension at work...tohavefun. The major reason is I like sports. I bring my clients and vendors. There’s something to capture anyone’s attention. ...Istay with them though. ESPN Zone makes me want to come back again. ...Youknow,I’mamanandit’s a sports place. I bring females to this place to eat. It’s up to the female to decide if we play games. —“Thomas,” male, early thirties, African American, computer network consultant The place makes me feel different. Chuck E. Cheese. It’s like I’m in a grown up Chuck E. Cheese. I feel uninhibited, free, and not so much con- cerned about things going on around. —“Veronica,” female, Caucasian, late twenties DIANA STORM is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Denmark. She has an M.A. in international commerce and modern language from Odense University (Den- mark). She was a visiting scholar at the Kellogg School of Management from September 1999 to June 2000. Her research focuses on consumer behavior on the Internet, investi- gating the ways that new technologies such as the Internet influence consumption behaviors and meaning formation processes. ADAM DUHACHEK is a Ph.D. student in marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. His research interests include sports and entertainment marketing, brand-building and brand-management issues, and consumer behavior on the Internet. Sherry et al. / BEING IN THE ZONE 467 It’s a cool place to work...youknow,nottoostressful. It’s not like being on a product line and having to produce pieces of something. People come and leave with a smile. I love my colleagues. Everyone doesn’t act the same. Everyone has their own style. My style is to be the funny- man...tocrack jokes and interact with folks. I tell them [customers] they look like different celebrities. After all, people come here and want to eat, drink, watch and play . that’s our logo you know [big smile]. —“Claudio,” male, early twenties, African American, ESPN Zone employee These informant quotes suggest some of the complex dynamics of the retail experience at ESPN Zone Chicago that this article will explore.1 A 35,000-square-foot retail complex owned and operated by entertainment conglomerate Walt Disney Company, ESPN Zone Chi- cago debuted on July 10, 1999, as the second of five current retail loca- tions. Building on its unrivalled experience in theme park design, Dis- ney’s imagineers have produced a sports and entertainment experience containing important implications for our understanding of contemporary consumption. ESPN Zone and themed retail environments fit into a stream of theo- retic scholarship that has critically examined the exploitative corporate intensification of unreality in society. Building on ideas originally artic- ulated by Frankfurt School scholars Adorno and Horkheimer (e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), Debord (1983) explored the “society of the spectacle” in terms of corporate entities’ exploiting consumer desire to maintain a relentlessly oppressive and inescapable industrial order that entices cooperation through desire rather than through threat KRITTINEE NUTTAVUTHISIT is a Ph.D. student in marketing at the Kellogg Gradu- ate School of Management. She is a scholar of the King Anandamahidol foundation in Thailand and a researcher of the dean’s student survey at Kellogg. She has worked for the Shell Companies as a project manager in new retail development and a supply manager in lubricants business. Her research interests are in consumer aesthetic experience, symbolic consumption, and retail’s architectural design. BENÉT DEBERRY-SPENCE is a Ph.D. student in marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a fellow of Northwestern University. Her research interests are in product transculturation, cross-cultural consumption, and consumer appropria- tion. She has extensive managerial experience in marketing, strategy, and business development, with a focus in global commercialization. She is a member of the National Black MBA Association and the past president of StreetWise, the largest North Ameri- can street newspaper. 468 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / AUGUST 2001 (what is termed, in critical theory parlance, a hegemony). In Debord’s view, society has become so enchanted by the overpowering glitz and glamour of the spectacular that everyday reality is undermined and devalued. While occasionally less critical and more celebratory than Debord (Firat and Venkatesh 1995), Baudrillard (1994) built on Debord’s theme of the society of the spectacle by theorizing that we live in a society in which the unreal is celebrated and elevated above the real. Baudrillard identified Disneyland as a quintessential example of what he termed “hyperreality.” Baudrillard argued that the theming of Dis- neyland indicates that nothing is real. Extending this nihilism, he believed that “the real is no longer real,” fantasy inexorably replaces reality, and themed places such as Disneyland are there to conceal this fact (pp. 12-13). The common element to these theories is the oppres- sion of consumers by corporations using entertainment and spectacle that confuse reality and unreality. Alternately, modern business writers have taken a much more posi- tive view of the prevalence of entertainment across the economy. Enter- tainment consultant Michael Wolf (1999) theorized that entertainment “is fast becoming the driving wheel of the new world economy” (p. 4). He also noted that “the lines between entertainment and not-entertainment are disappearing” (p. 51). Replacing the word entertainment with fantasy, unreality, or spectacle thus yields a hypothesis not significantly different from that of Horkheimer, Debord, or Baudrillard. However, Wolf saw entertainment as a form of almost-inevitable technological- industrial progress (he deprecatingly describes China, India, and the Islamic nations as “the underscreened, undermalled, still-waiting-for- cable world” [p. 15]). Furthermore, he viewed entertainment as a source of common interests and, thus, community (p. 38). The predominance of entertainment fits perfectly into a society in which time is scarce and in which “shopping” itself has becomes “a leisure activity” (p. 61). Per- haps most fundamentally, he described entertainment as a vital and nec- essary balm addressing the “emotional needs” of modern life (p. 36). Unlike Debord and Baudrillard, Wolf saw the increase in entertainment and spectacle as fulfilling a genuine consumer need, being driven by marketplace demands for more leisure, community, and escapist relax- ation. According to Wolf, the themed environment is an increasingly important place in which this demand is fulfilled. Sherry et al. / BEING IN THE ZONE 469 In perhaps no other area is spectacle more dramatically purveyed to customers than in the theming of retail spaces. As Lefebvre ([1976] 1991, 21) has noted, capitalism achieves its remarkable success and growth in part by way of the manner in which it occupies and produces “a space.” Production of the profit-marking space of spectacle has increasingly permeated and influenced commercial and retail marketing efforts. Themed malls, themed parks, themed hotels, and, of course, themed restaurants are but a few examples of arenas influenced by the urge to theme. Businesses like the Hard Rock Café and Planet Holly- wood were among the first to offer unique dining experiences that melded entertainment experiences—with their attendant allusions of wealth and fantasy—with the experience of dining out.

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